


recalibrate me, baby

by dressruffles



Series: femmexo bingo fills [5]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Cyborgs, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 02:16:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6451504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dressruffles/pseuds/dressruffles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jongdae wouldn't mind a vacation.  [robots/ai/cyborg au.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	recalibrate me, baby

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not an IT/technology person so this takes some suspension of disbelief if you are one, probably. I mention other exo members briefly, like usual. yifan is one of the people mentioned, just a heads up. 
> 
> ((reposted from lj.))

Jongdae reboots with a fucking migraine.

"Why did you give me pain receptors?" She groans out. "You're the worst."

Tao's nibbling on a pen – her really fancy one the robotics department head gifted her that's made with real gold and inlaid with tiny diamonds – and staring at some charts on her clipboard. "If you're not suuuuuuper realistic, what's the point?"

Jongdae is realistic and humanoid in basically every possible way. Like…so much so that sometimes, when she's allowed to wander far enough off the campus, people think she's a normal young adult just bumming around. Which is cool or whatever, since Jongdae doesn't know any other way of life – but being able to feel pain sometimes seems pretty unnecessary to top it all off. So what Tao can do is she can just go jump in a lake, Jongdae thinks crossly.

Unfortunately Jongdae is hooked up for a full service and processing units inspection. This means that Tao has that one machine on that displays in real time and extensive detail Jongdae’s thought process tree, each and every branch and node to be referred to and overlooked later and make sure there aren't any sketchy jumps in her logic and reasoning connections. Like from 'I want tea' to 'the human race should be exterminated and enslaved and I think I'll start by co-opting the computer science department's K.A.I. super computer to learn every secret there is to this university and its technological security to take them down – and also to read and make public that one Professor Byun's increasingly weird and kind of perverted emails she's sending to K.A.I. to see if she can throw off the logarithms a little and incite more and more humanly shocked and/or disgusted reactions'.

(Jongdae only knows about those emails because K.A.I. and she talk about their time spent here at the university on the days Tao shuts her down for updates and plugs her into the larger institute network system to dick around with general stuff inside her head and back all the versions of her up. K.A.I. is actually a pretty cute kid – uh, or fellow A.I.. She's younger than Jongdae by years of inception and research and has only been culminated as an actual tangible technological feat in the past recent months, shown by how her department hasn't even nicknamed her yet past her program acronym, so Jongdae calls her a kid in her head. And occasionally out loud, which apparently freaks _some_ of the researchers out. Again, the whole potential ‘I will become your A.I. overlord’ about-face thing they're worried about.)

Tao can speed read like an inhuman freak of nature though, so she catches that one node about the lake, and her eyebrow twitches.

"I'll gut your programming codes and leave you unencrypted so imageboard lurkers can hack you," Tao threatens menacingly. She pauses. "Also, why do you have a node that's titled 'backslash-quote-robotic-voice-end-quote'?"

Jongdae flutters her eyelashes (which Tao scalped from a morgue apparently, which is kind of gross and something Jongdae always remembers when fluttering them, for some reason). "I'm the department darling, you'd never get away with it," she reminds Tao sweetly. "And none of your business about my robot voice." She makes her voice _do_ the robot voice thing on the very words 'robot voice', because she's hilarious. Her wit processors are like. The best part of her, probably.

Tao squints at Jongdae, not amused with the display, and scrunches up her mouth, as she marks something down on her clipboard again. "Note to self," Tao says loudly and demonstratively. "C.H.E.N. prototype…has personality issues. Needs major…recalibrations.”

"Recalibrate my personality and I'll upload _all_ your research and notes onto the web."

Tao scoffs. "Think I don't have safeguards against that?"

Jongdae scoffs right back. "Think Lu Han isn't a fucking shark?"

Tao pauses for a long moment, and Jongdae counts the seconds as they pass, waiting for her quip to set in. Then, at the 4 second mark, Tao slowly extricates the pen (which has only recently found itself back in her mouth) from between her teeth, and looks up at Jongdae with an accusatory glare. "You've been letting her tinker in your head?!"

Jongdae shrugs. Letting. Being manhandled by half the department behind Tao's back to hook her up to their computers and see what makes her tick. Semantics.

Tao now looks livid – ah shoot, right, that stupid thought branch machine – 

"That's – that's tampering!" Tao says fiercely. "I mean, for all intents and purposes, you're the end result of my research and everything, but you're _technically_ still an experiment. And they've been messing with the data! With the variables!"

"They haven't been changing anything," Jongdae points out. "You'd have totally noticed that, right? More like…popping open the hood to get a glance in at the engine." 

Jongdae only kind of lets them – lets the ones she know don't _really_ mean any harm – coerce her into their labs to plug her up and scratch what's on the surface in ways that don't need administrator rights to peek at. She's got lots of access to information about the faculty, and in general Tao keeps her logic and reasoning processors in tip-top shape most of the time, so Jongdae knows which people are actually absolutely bad news. If those certain individuals try to pull rank on her and tinker with her shit, she can always just run away. That, or do a forcible emergency security shut down where she locks down all her importing and exporting ports and her entire system, entire _everything_ , is encrypted and needs admin privileges to open her back up.

Tao cannot be appeased so easily. "I'm reporting this shit. If Yifan – if she can't get her goddamn department under control or under surveillance, then it's a threat to everyone's work integrity!"

Jongdae sighs – but then there's a little nudging thought that's slowly coming to the front of her processing and it's – 

"…Wait," Tao says, voice suddenly dipping back low, anger displaced by a new, troubled expression. "You mentioned pain receptors earlier. Are you hurting right now?"

Jongdae blinks slowly. "Just a…mi…graine…" Oh. _Oh_. That's…she usually gets them either after overloading her processors – which doesn't happen all that often – or right after she forces a shutdown without going through the proper protocols. Which she typically only does under distress.

Tao's eyes go wide. "I thought you were just being a piece of shit doing an encrypted shutdown here in the lab because you didn't want to go through a tune-up! Which is like… _ugh_ Jongdae, but whatever – but this? Ugh, _Jongdae_ – was someone _in here_?"

Jongdae tries to remember – but those kinds of rushed shutdowns mess with her, well, everything. "I'll…probably remember who within the hour?" She offers, a little sheepishly. "It wasn't Lu Han, though! That's not what I meant when I said she was a shark."

Tao's setting down her clipboard and walking to her desk to find her phone. "I know what you meant – of course it wasn’t Lu Han. I know who I can trust in this department.” 

Tao digs her cell phone from the mess on her desk and flourishes it commandingly. “But I'm calling Yifan. And Junmyeon, because the computer science people probably need to be on guard too."

Oh, Jongdae thinks sullenly, she's gonna get all the technology department heads involved and they’re gonna go all super security and lock everything down. Probably review all the security tapes, check log-in ids and timestamps, look for leaks – the works, while everyone’s projects and programs are kept under heavy lock and key. Looks like Jongdae and K.A.I. will have plenty of time to spend offline together in the very near future.

"Stop sulking," Tao says as she waits and listens to the ringing of her phone. "It's for your own good. And I hear L.A.Y.'s been transferred back here recently.” Tao grins fondly, and Jongdae finds herself reciprocating it as well, at the mention of such an old friend. “Good old Yixing. Catch up with her, have a good time, and think of it like a vacation."

At that Jongdae rolls her eyes, but she does try to sulk a little less visibly. Yixing is totally cool, and it's been what, two years, since they relocated her to a Chinese institute and been using those servers as her home offline base. It might be good to catch up.

"Hey, Yifan," Tao says, voice instantly going sugary sweet. Which puts Jongdae on guard probably as much as it puts Yifan on guard, because whatever Tao's getting ready to follow it up with – "Why the _hell_ do you have thieving criminals in your faculty and when are you planning to root them out and fire them?"

Jongdae sighs at the new severity of Tao's tone, and lies back down on the examining table. She can hear Yifan's deep, calm voice murmur something unintelligibly over the phone soothingly, and watches as Tao bristles and starts to explain shrilly what exactly is going on. This conversation is going to be long, arduous, and a little high-strung and Jongdae’s not looking forward to bearing witness to it.

Yep, might as well think of the whole ensuing and inevitable fall-out that's to come as a vacation.


End file.
